


[DISCONTINUED] Full.Connection

by Bambeptin



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF, Team Crafted, The Creatures, The Yogscast
Genre: Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Mild Gore, Minecraft taken completely seriously and some things taken at face value, Multi, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-05
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-01-11 07:53:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1170579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bambeptin/pseuds/Bambeptin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four territories that make up the known world, each with it's own cast and own slew of problems. One facing a food shortage after connections were cut when they became an island. Another with the possibility of a nuclear and magical war, not to mention the undertones of human testing at the main research facility. A small, minuscule piece of land without any connections to anyone else facing a threat that one small team can't handle. The last coming face-to-face with a technological death, the very platforms that use to entertain falling to the ground below. </p><p>Welcome to Minecraftia.</p><p>[[Sorry everyone, I don't have the motivation to continue this fanfic! I would say 'maybe some time later' but that would be a lie and most likely I'd completely rewrite it]]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. //Welcome to the Golden Lights.tc

**Author's Note:**

> All the chapters have indicators at the end of the chapter title for which Youtube group the POV is in, with .yog being in the POV of a character in The Yogscast, .cre for The Creatures (and friends), .ah for Achievement Hunters, and .tc for Team Crafted (and friends).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, one tick is 1/20 of a second. The term "a few hundred ticks" would be close to a second.

The bright lights of a Budder City, the capitol of the Team Crafted Territory, shone into the night sky above and blocked out all of the stars, leaving the moon hanging alone in the sky. The _Zeus_ tower stood above the skyline, screen flashing between scene and scene until it focused on one - various angles of Sky and Deadlox, readying up and having small talk.

A crowd surrounded the screens, eagerly awaiting the competition to heat up. A few banners, ranging from simple words like "Go Deadlox" to "The King never loses" were raised above their heads and waving around in the faint wind. Lights were placed everywhere to highlight everything, from the small nooks and crannies in between the buildings to showing off the scenes etched into the columns. Budder was in _everything_ , from the intricate designs on the walls to making up the statues of the founders.

The whole city had an air of high-life in it, even in the medium wealth areas where it wasn't so ornately decorated. The spiralling tower was visible from all parts of the city, whether you lived in an apartment or a in a luxurious condo, sitting in your balcony pool.

A countdown ticked down to the starting time, sending out a beep that echoed throughout the city.

_300 ticks remaining._

Just another ordinary day in the nicknamed, "Golden Lights City".

Entertainment central of Team Crafted Territory - no, probably all of Minecraftia.

Sky cracked his knuckles, looking at the new parkour course that was specially built by Bodil for another Sky vs Deadlox race. It looked quite challenging, but that wasn't what bothered him - a pool of water was below most, but not all, of the track. Sky was pretty sure what lay in the murky depths.

To be honest, he never really put much thought about where the squids came from in the first place.

His sunglasses let out a small ping as the interface showed up, showing him his hunger, healthbar, his current toolbar (which was filled with nothing to prevent cheating), some white floating names above others who had the interface, and the recording status.

_0 ticks remaining._

**_Begin._ **

Sky went first, launching himself feet forwards towards the first platform. His gauntlets and knee-pads began to flicker and finally stabilised to a constant glow as he sprinted across the floating mechanism, lights moving around erratically.

He dared not look back - ticks wasted that he could have been running the parkour course. _Breath in. Breath out. Jump, dive, run. Repeat. Don't look back. Don't look at the glaring lights._

Sure, everyone in the territory knew that the evil ones came from some kind of squid dimension, but how did a rip to a completely different dimension get cut into the fabric of space-time in the first place? No one _here_ could have been able to, and even if they could, Sky could have easily picked them out from the ranks of squids that assaulted the territory every once in a while. That left the possibility of a traitor, but he didn't really want to believe that.

He could hear Deadlox's feet pounding against the platform. The timer was there in the corner of his eye, it's irritating red light counting down to the end of the record time. _Beat your score. Jump, dive, run. Repeat. Don't look down into the water. Don't look down at the squids._

The only people that could have did it were one of the neighbouring territories.

Sky let out a small puff before hopping onto the next block, a small trail of yellow light emanating from his gauntlets to show how he moved. This whole thing was being recorded for the whole city to watch on the screens, and one slip-up meant possible public humiliation.

Not the best for the king and founder of the territory.

He forced his breaths to become longer, to slow his heartbeat. _Jump, dive, run. Repeat. The island doesn't matter now._

More like the only people that could have did it were people from the neighbouring territo _ry,_ singular. The island fell into disrepair after connections were cut ages ago by the sand bridge falling into the ocean's depths (totally squids), not to mention rumours that every human died out, leaving vast amounts of horrifying creatures in it's wake. This led to some lame re-naming of the island from "Asgard" to "The Creature's Island" by the Council of the Territories, and earning a big fat "do not enter" mark on new maps.

Not that anyone could get near in the first place, that island was always surrounded by whirlpools for some indiscernible reason.

Deadlox barely made the jump behind him, almost slipping off at the last ticks. They both knew that there was water to catch their fall (and a respawning system just in case they ended up as a blood splatter on the ground), but they also knew that there were a big flock of squids, tentacles ready to grab them.

It was a common fact that Sky was absolutely _terrified_ of squids, even before the squid dimension opened, for some reason. He was barely able to keep himself together in a puddle of squids with three people, and it mostly ended up with him as a screaming mess.

With an army beside him though, it had gotten a bit better.

With a grunt, he threw himself at the wall and clenched his fists around a ladder rung, his legs dangling below him. He could almost feel the gaze of thousands of people at the back of his neck, and the nervousness almost made him miss the next rung. Heaving himself up and placing both of his legs on a solid surface, he turned, back faced to the wall, and started inching towards the end of the horizontally placed ladders. A few budder blocks were placed on the end and he stared at it, mouth almost watering. _Yes._ He needed that. He tried not to think about the horrors that lay below him, but he snuck a glance at the heights and -

The next thing he knew he was falling and spinning and falling and tumbling and falling and his ponytail was slapping him right in the face and _oh_ ** _Notch_** _the ground is coming up to say hi-_

* * *

_Welcome to Yoglabs._

_A familiar voice. The_ **_bearded_ ** _dude who showed him around the facility._ **_Research is there. Testing is there._ ** _There are our employees._ **_Don't go there_ ** _, he says._

**_But what's in there?_ ** _He blinks slowly, his eyelids feeling heavy. He can barely do anything but stand, stand on the sand. Jump, dive,_ **_run_ ** _. Breath_ **_in_ ** _, breath_ **_out_ ** _. You_ **_hit the water too hard_ ** _. You_ **_drowned_ ** _. You are_ **_dead_ ** _. You are_ **_not_ ** _. You are_ **_respawning_ ** _._

_Screams can be heard, echoed throughout the walls and bouncing inside his head. Sound too loud. Lights_ **_too bright_ ** _. Where are my_ **_sunglasses_ ** _._

_The_ **_goateed_ ** _man only smiles as he disappears into a pile of sand. Sunk into the ocean. The Creature's Island, The Creatures Island,_ **_The Creatures_ ** _, Island, stands in front of him, the white walls of Yoglabs dissolving into the same grainy substance._

_The waves crashing against the land beckons him._ **_Weren't you here?_ ** _With the_ **_sly fox_ ** _. And the_ **_masked wolf._ ** _And the_ **_fedora guy_ ** _. Minecraftia Daily, they called it,_ **_Minecraft Daily._ ** _How many episodes?_

_Terrifying creatures,_ **_dislocated jaws._ ** _Claws._ **_Stitched_ ** _arms. No arms. The sharp tang of blood blossoming into a thousand hearts,_ **_red, brown, green, white_ ** _, grey_ **_scarves_ ** _, ribbons, tentacles that flew up into the sky and became a squid, flying around as if swimming through a think liquid._

_He looked down. His skin was_ **_grey-blue_ ** _. White. Black._ **_Angry_ ** _. Loving._ **_Shifting_ ** _. How many fingers did he have?_

_They appeared and disappeared each tick, clueing him in on the dream-like nature of the environment. The language scrawled onto the air was garbled. Scrambled. Scrambling._ **_Humans, scrambling._ **

_Welcome to_ **_Yoglabs_ ** _. Welcome to_ **_The Creatures_ ** _. Welcome._ **_0 Ticksremaining._ **

_Oh shit, trippy dream again._

_What the hell is my brain on-_

**_Begin._ **

* * *

Bright lights leaked through his eyelids, a small yawn coming to his lips as he dimly realised he was in the city's hospital. For like the five thousandth time this week. He arched his back as he squirmed out of the covers and sat up, the dream slowly being pushed back to the edge of his memory. _Shit, that was way more weird than normal._

White, cold, scratchy and sterile. It was probably the second most uncomfortable thing for him, the first being the squids.

Beeps interrupted the silence every few ticks. As if he couldn't figure out for himself that he was still breathing, his heart still beating. He looked out the familiar window out at the city - _his_ city - with small budder ornaments and carvings littered around the ledges and parkour areas. The screen displayed on the _Zeus_ , the tallest tower, was currently cycling through the news. Economy, who was the best at parkour (naturally, him), their number 1 company that traded with them for technology possibly being evil, sports, the same old thing.

The click of a door handle turning interrupted him from his thoughts as he squinted his eyes at the headline, his dream immediately clicking back into his brain. What was in the forbidden corridor? _"Breaking News: Yoglabs preforming illegal experiments? Find out today at-"_

"Respawn successful?"

He yawned again and pulled some of the tubes monitoring his health off of him, causing the machine to flatline with an annoying beep. "Naturally. When hasn't it worked? Besides, I'm here right now, am I?"

Deadlox rolled his eyes, brushing the hair from his ears so his ultra high tech headphones or whatever they were weren't covered with his hair. What was covered with his hair, AKA _half of his face_ , remained the same.

Sometimes Sky wondered if a demonic eye or maybe a robotic one was down there or something, but let's be honest here, that's not exactly at the top of his mind.

"It's new technology, it might bring you back with like," he motioned towards his side, " _Tentacles_ growing out of your back. Or wings."

"First of all, the wings would be cool, and second of all," he made an over-the-top gagging sound and gripped at his neck, "Yuck."

Sky did a fake spasm in his bed, flopping around like a dead fish. It was surprisingly accurate, even as his hair accidentally caught on the bed and he was pulled to an abrupt and painful stop.

The other rolled his eyes, smiling, and threw him a bundle of clothes. "Come on zombie, we need to show the public that you're still alive after yesterday's fiasco."

"You think they'd realise that dying isn't a big problem anymore?"

"Doubt it." he positioned his headphones so that they hung loosely off of his head, allowing him to hear a marginal amount better, and looked at Sky with a 'you know how they are' look. "Yes, of course it's perfectly fine seeing your beloved _king_ ," he stretched out the 'king' part and the whole sentence was laced with various amounts of sarcasm, " _Knocked out_ as he hit the water and _drown_ in a big pile of squid. You know, it's only _slightly_ traumatising."

Sky grinned and slipped his normal armour on top of the hospital shirt (which was practically his own from his various visits), careful not to cut any wires or tubing that connected him to the mainframe, or supplied the awesome lights. Time to change the subject. "Anyway, Yoglabs being evil?", he dropped his voice a bit as he looped his amulet around his neck, "Why did no one tell me this?"

Deadlox pointed to a tower of unfinished paperwork that was moved to the hospital from his office. One piece of paper fluttered down onto the white tiles, reminding him that yup, he didn't complete any of his work. Hooray, procrastinating. "Somewhere in there."

Sky groaned in reply, flopping down onto the bed and pulling the covers over his head. "You know what? I don't feel so good. Maybe some horns will grow out of my head. Or a tail."

He let a mock wail of pain and twisted his face, but Deadlox wasn't laughing like normal. "Sky, you know what this means? About Yoglabs, not the whole fake demon mode thing."

A cloud passed over the sun, putting the room into an eerie light as the LED lights flickered on, shining right through the covers. "Oh _Notch_ , get me my sunglasses. This light's killing me-"

"Sky, if Yoglabs turns out bad, the Council will force it to shut down and you to cut off trade routes. We'll end up like the island.", his voice was serious now instead of his playful banter, dropping in a few pitches to turn into a curt growl.

He paused, putting a hand over his strangely sensitive eyes. Notch, the light was so unforgiving in the hospital, he hated it. "What do you mean, ' _like the island'_? I don't suppose we'll suddenly turn into half-human half-whatever hybrids."

"There aren't any respawns for the cities themselves, Sky. Parkouring platforms will fall from the _air_ , with who knows how many casualties. Not including the death from the standard protests, or people starving out. No replacement tech, no lights, no electricity, energy source will eventually fail. We'll be dead in the squid-infested water." he circled the room, tapping appliances with his finger as he went, mouthing 'dead' to all of them, "We don't have enough research and tech to keep this place running and alive."

A look of realisation and complete horror dawned onto the Budder King's face as the words sunk in.

The whole city was heading towards a technological death.


	2. //Toxic Island.cre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A block is about a meter, and a chunk is about half a kilometer.

Pulling back a spider-string bowstring, he felt it tighten up around his grip around the notched arrow. The oak bow creaked from the strain put onto it, it being not exactly the best made in the whole world, and his ears resonated with a ' _twang_ ' as the arrow was sent flying, spinning through the leaves and the air towards it's target.

And of course, thanks to his shoddy aiming skills, promptly missed it's target and instead lodged itself into a nearby tree with an audible thunk.

"What the _fuck_ , Chilled?" Ze recoiled in surprise, the items in his hands dropping down in front of him as he drew back both of his arms. The dirt was immediately sucked into Ze's inventory as he narrowed his eyes and opened it, a floating blue screen displayed from his almost unnoticeable headphones.

Chilled instead chuckled and adjusted his microphone so it would be closer to his mouth. If it were any closer, Ze would have heard his heavy panting and his laughter giving the whole prank away, or maybe he might have interpreted it as Chilled getting some weird thoughts about his body and his heartbeat acting accordingly.

Dangling his legs into the air and clutching the branch with both of his hands, he dropped down onto the patch of soil in the shade.

Naturally, that force dropped a huge pile of leaves right onto his face.

Chilled spat out a leaf, gagging and screaming, flapping around his arms to shake off the remaining leaves.

"F-Fuck!" First he the prank didn't work out as planned, and now he was the subject to laughter. Ze was over there, the arrow mere blocks (okay, maybe blocks was a bit away) from his body, and wiping the tears from his eyes as his breath got shallower from laughing.

Ze's laughter finally subsided to a small chuckle he couldn't hold in every once on a while, and he plucked a leaf from Chilled's mop of hair, dodging stray flails from his arm, and dropped it a bit away.

"Wow Chilled, at least think of the consequences before trying to take my eye out." he said with a smile, watching the other calm down and try to straighten up his white wool sweater and his oversized scarf in an attempt to regain his composure. The strange stitches that covered his body were visible for a brief tick before he rolled down his loose sleeves again, a reminder of his Sackboy (or 'Cloth Colossal', as they were called before the Toxic) heritage.

To everyone, Chilled looked like a completely normal human being (minus the stitches that ran from one side of his jaw to the other, splitting his mouth and nose-eyes area, and stitches that separated both of his arms into two parts). Upon closer examination though, it was quite obvious that he was a hybrid - a human that wasn't fully, well, human.

Although his body was certainly a human, or multiple humans from the different skin tones that made up his skin underneath the cloth, his birth certainly was not a normal one.

It was honestly too bad he didn't really like to talk about his parents. I mean, _really_ awkward talking about them when you're practically wearing their cloth corpses on your body right at this moment.

His eyes, although sometimes lit up from excitement, were glazed over. He was certainly alive, but from the time Ze had been sneaking out of The Creature Treehouse to meet up with him, his body somehow wasn't. A clear sign that he wasn't human.

That, and the fact that every, or at least most (since Gassy was still around) non-hybrid human got killed by the Toxic.

More specifically, the gas that managed to poison and kill anyone and everyone but them. The half-humans. The unfavourables.

"I wasn't going to take your eye out, don't be so dra- _ma_ -tic!" he threw up both of his hands, "Maybe it would have hit your shoulder or something."

Ze rolled his eyes, fingers brushing over the badly-created arrow (Chilled, of course, was terrible at crafting as he was with common sense) to check if he could pull it out. Despite the aim, the arrow was lodged in surprisingly deep.

A small ping opened up the chatbar, a small, almost-transparent screen that was displayed in front of him. The grey screen floated right in front of Chilled, who let out a big puff and went through it to catch his friend's attention.

"Who's messaging you now, buddy...?" he was now stationed behind Ze, peering above his shoulder easily from the height difference, "Hope it's not Smarty or someone. Abyss Summoner should really learn when to lay his hands off of your butt."

Ze could hear him mumbling something about how 'Ze's butt is mine', but didn't bother to speak up about how much that implied, instead turning his attention to the white, pixelated words in front of him. They slowly became less blurry as the pair of headphones collected solar energy, providing more power.

_**UberHaxorNova:** yooooo_

_**UberHaxorNova:** actually, maybe I don't want to complete the profane part of it_

Of course, Nova again. It was always like this, him checking up on where he went. If it wasn't all of the guys sending messages at the same time.

_**SSoHPKC:** It's perfectly fine to swear in front of your friends, Nova. In the matter of fact, I do recall hearing you use some choice words on all of us just yesterday. _

_**SlyFoxHound:** specially me _

_**SlyFoxHound:** ;3_

Look, there they were right now. Ze sighed and ignored Chilled's increasingly high-pitched questions.

_**UberHaxorNova:** whatever _

_**UberHaxorNova:** look where the hell are you _

_**UberHaxorNova:** we need your assistance ok _

_**UberHaxorNova:** I really don't care how much you're enjoying nature rn just get your smooth ass outta the forest and into the _

_**UberHaxorNova:** other forest? are jungles called forests or are they just jungles_

They were also extremely gullible in believing the lie that he always went out to enjoy nature. For weeks at a time.

Seamus did seem a bit suspicious, but he already had his hands full in trying to keep everyone from killing each other.

Making typing motions in the air, he quickly sent a message to the guys.

_**ZeRoyalViking:** I'll be there don't worry._

Even though society completely fell into ruin, leaving the hybrids out to wander in the untamed wild and the ruins eaten away by the Toxic, they still had their technology. It was surprisingly waterproof and anything-proof, and turned out very useful once it was discovered that it didn't run on the City power (which was now long-gone), and instead only relied on itself and other headphones.

With a chatbar (nicknames carried over from pre-Toxic to post-Toxic world), a screen displaying your inventory, your health and hunger, a way to talk to your survival group even when chunks away, and running on solar power, it was a must-have.

The only downside that it was a fairly old model. Who knew how they were on the mainland? Of course, if the sand bridge didn't suddenly dissolve into the ocean, this wouldn't have happened. The models over there seemed pretty cool, too. There were watches that could make you fly or make items appear from thin air, or things implanted into your eye so tha-

"ZE?! Can you even hear me, buddy?"

The shout deafened him, leaving him momentarily confused. "What?"

"Just made sure you didn't go on a mental Nether adventure again."

Along with the sneak-outs to Chilled, Gassy, Diction, and the rest of the bunch, he also went on frequent trips to the Nether. Which baffled everyone as he came back time and time again, without a single singed hair or a piece of burnt cloth.

What he didn't tell them was that sometimes he saw more people not from the Island, playing games that involved trapping Nether mobs in cages and calling it a 'no petting' zoo. Two men, a person clad in a creeper suit and another who had a strange fascination with roses, were trying to box in a Ghast or two for some unknown reason.

He did NOT want to associate with them at all.

Coming back was fai-

"Ze, you're honestly getting cross-eyed." Chilled gave a concerned look, cupping his bearded chin with his hand, "Do you need medical assistance?"

Ze liked how the other had a slight lisp, unnoticeable if you weren't looking for it. It might be because his top row of teeth and bottom row of teeth were from completely separate bodies, but you just don't know.

"N-nah. I just need to head back."

"Aw man, it's only noon..." he dragged out the noon, flopping onto Ze's back.

"Chilled."

"Oh, fine."

* * *

Ze panted as he flew through the branches, hands and feet in a perfect rhythm as he gripped and launched himself at the next tree, murky green eyes only focused on what was in front of him and what he should do to get there.

A compass pointed in the direction of 'home', or his last slept-in bed, and a small map was up. Oh, what a great time to have waypoints. Too bad, since this was pretty much the model right before the one that actually added waypoints.

His inventory screen floated to his right, his projected body in the little screen running along and jumping, mirroring his actions exactly. His battleaxe was still strapped to his back by some leather, ornate carvings untouched by the dirt and grime of the wild world.

Ze went through the coordinates in his mind, making a fast route in his head. In one swift movement, he felt the branch beneath him turn into air as he leapt from one side of a ravine to the other, eyes not daring to look at the sheer drop that ravines were famous for, and the loot that was always embedded within it's walls.

He felt his hands grip something that wasn't quite wood and almost faltered, but swung himself around anyway. Cursing under his breath, he sat down and took a breather, eyeing it suspiciously.

A bit of dark green, still-damp moss covered it, but he scraped it away with his fingernails (plopping the refreshingly cool moss on his head), and examined it closely.

His head slowly looked up.

Old building. Metal. Strange, this area of the island was always for more rural living, like farming and stuff. Stealing old potatoes and melons (along with slaughtering the remaining animals) was always a treat whenever they found a farm.

Then it clicked.

Literally.

First it clicked in his mind, sending his whole body into a panic. Gassy described these all the time, the places where he got his signature gas mask and his throat/voice-mod, telling stories of a pre-Toxic world where he was another faceless government goon. Metal, in places you'd never imagine - a government building. He'd pause whenever they asked him about what was in the buildings, of course. Look away and pretend the question was never asked.

In front of Ze was a broken fence, already starting to be reclaimed by the jungle. A building, completely rectangle and half-hidden by the overgrowth stood not far into the area. No sense in looking for bodies here - the jungle always found some way of taking it back.

The metal 'tree' clicked second. Colourful birds suddenly sprang to life, a flock chirping angrily as leaves began to fall in a blinding swirl.

He barely managed to make it out as the metal beam fell, the glass above shattering as it hit the floor. He landed in the dirt, face-first, and skidding to a halt with his feet only a centimetre away from the landing point. Ze squeezed his eyes shut as the world slowly quieted down, returning to the normal sounds of nature.

Cautiously opening his eye and coughing out debris, he saw a few forms on top of the beam with odd protrusions out of them. Oh god, it can't be Nova, could it? That wouldn't look good on the tombstone; UberHaxorNova was doomed to fall. UberHaxorNova, speared on metal.

No respawns, unfortunately. It took only 300 tick for you to begin, and only a fraction of that for you to meet an untimely end.

As his vision cleared and he rubbed the dirt out of his eyes, the others were stirring, too.

"Ten out of ten job, Nova."

Well, Seamus was alive for sure.

"Hey! Ze!" Nova spoke up, bursting out of a bush as if a giant metal pillar didn't send them all crashing down, "Check it out!"

He lifted up the protrusion, which turned out to be an arm.

How morbid.

"No, no! _This!_ "

The 'skin' proceeded to peel off, much to Ze's disgust, to reveal pistons and generally mechanical stuff that was not flesh underneath. Wires ran throughout the entire length and dangled out of the detached arm, tangled in the air. Dim lights made it glow an eerie blue, the remaining skin lighting up before it too fell off. It took a few ticks for Ze to comprehend what he was seeing. Didn't it make a tiny bit of sense now? Gassy always faltering when he spoke about robots and having a strange knowledge of robotics? The odd rumors of people with metal arms and metal hearts, only for the accusers to be nowhere to be found the very next day.

They didn't find just another ordinary government base.

They found the robotics production line.


	3. //Star T oday.cre

A log landed in the roaring fire, sending a spray of ashes and sparks up into the night sky. Thunder rolled in the distance, a dark cloud over the small speck that was the mainland, lightning setting the night ablaze.

A small makeshift oven was set above the flame, metal bars holding up a cracked pot and boiling water inside, wheat and other random edible items floating in the bubbling liquid. The lid on the pot was missing, steam floating into the sky and boiling water haphazardly splashed out of the cracks onto the clearing and managed to boil a trail of ants alive.

They had managed to rip apart the robotic arm that they found during the day, but thanks to Nova it took a while after they had somehow lost it in the dense jungle. They found it carried by a pack of ocelots, the one that looked like the leader with a red gash on his forehead and spaced-out look in it's eyes, and they put up quite a fight for a pack of glorified housecats. By the time they reached the ruined government building, the sun had already started to make it's descent into the earth.

Better to start later than to be eaten alive by mobs.

Ze shuffled awkwardly in the funny-shaped leaves, some shredding under his feet. It had been quiet for a long while, especially after they found out that the key component to making the arm work was damaged beyond repair. To be more specific, none of them could fix it and none of them were willing to learn on the spot.

So, of course, Nova threw it over a cliff in rage into a churning river.

The fox hybrid glared at Nova, ears twitching angrily, blaming him for their predicament. To be honest, having some quality friendship time in a clearing right next to a huge discovery didn't sound like the best thing that could happen, but it could have been worse.

Nova avoided Sly's gaze, instead suddenly becoming interesting in picking off a scab on his knee. Ze had no idea where or how he got it, as he never really followed his friend's news.

"Maybe you can use that fire to cauterise that," SlyFox rolled his eyes as he said that, the fact that the shark hybrid was ignoring him completely obvious to the group, "Oh wait, the piston that would have been perfect for a hot poker is missing." Sly spat out the last word, flashing his pointed teeth.

Nova just grumbled under his breath, words like "fuck you, Sly" and "may Notch strike down your dick with his holy shaft of lightning" raised above the rest.

Even though it wasn't appropriate for the mood, Ze felt laughter build up in his chest and had to bite his lip to stop it. Unfortunately, his teeth also pierced his lip and started bleeding

Without making a sound, he spat out a bit of blood, hating the tang of iron that stuck in his mouth. He wasn't really sure why every single time he smelled or tasted blood, bile would rise into his throat and he felt like he would vomit, but what he did know that it was a thing that happened.

Nova had obviously seen him in the dimming light of the campfire, turning his head around from Sly to look at the distracted Viking. "Hey, uh," he paused, going through possible sentences in his head, instead choosing the easiest one, "You alright?"

"Mhmm."

Silence lingered in the clearing, faint groans of zombies echoing through the jungle. Thank god they picked a relatively safe area which they could bolt from if danger was to appear, otherwise they'd be screwed.

Nova had given up trying to talk to Ze and instead returned to ignoring Sly slipping in a few insults now and then, and sometimes even throwing in a mock punch. Nova retaliated by biting on his hand once Sly tried to 'punch' him again, shark teeth cutting in easily.

"Hey,  _HEY_!" Sly used his left had to pry Nova off, waving his right around wildly. His voice turned high-pitched as he inspected his hand with a pouty-face, narrowed eyes staring at Nova. "Asshole."

"Excuse me?  _Who_  is the one that's  _punching_  the other," he dragged out every other word, "And blaming them for a simple  _mistake_?"

Sly snorted before opening his mouth for a retort before Seamus threw a rock at both of them, hitting Nova squarely in the nose.

"Can you ladies  _please_  stop fighting over there? Some of us," Seamus motioned between himself and Ze, "Are trying to listen to the horrifying sounds of the mobs that are no doubt closing in on us right now."

Sly ignored Seamus' dry remark, instead faking a grimace and clutching his hand. "Ooh, I can feel an infection coming on already. We might even need to chop it off!" he dramatically shoved it in front of Nova, who was fuming and looked like he might explode at any minute, "But, as I said before, that piece that could have been used for a cauterising tool is gone!"

"Shut the fuck  _UP_ , Sly." he muttered threateningly. Sly just giggled again and toppled backwards, feet in the air.

Even Seamus mustered a smile, looking at both of them like a parent would at two squabbling children. His smile froze, though, and eyes widened as he heard the sounds of leaves brushing against each other, and twigs snapping underneath some kind of force.

Nova must have heard, too, because he also stopped what he was doing. Cautiously, he lifted up his iron sword and gripped it in his right hand, his eyes staring at the source of the sound.

Sly was still oblivious and was giggling until Nova kicked him in the side.

Seamus slowly got up, face returning to a neutral position. The shuffling sounds got louder, mixed in with a few moans and groans of an undead creature. They all stood, frozen in the spot, one hand on whatever weapon they managed to bring (except for Sly, who held onto the robotic arm like a lifeline), and waited for the inevitable to come.

The moans stopped as fast as they had appeared.

Sly breathed a sigh of relief.

Which was cut off after a sickly green hand, skin was pulled taut over the bones, holes in flesh like Swiss fucking cheese, grabbed him by the neck and started strangling him.

Seamus was the first to react, bringing down his sword on top of the approximate location of the zombie's head. Instead it sunk into it's shoulder, it making garbled noises with it's mangled throat. It loosened it's grip for just a tick.

Sly spun around and kicked it with his legs, launching himself in the opposite direction of the undead monster.

The zombie was in full view now. One of it's arms was dangling by a thin strand of muscle, still moving somehow even on it's precarious perch. It had bumps all over it, sticking out awkwardly form it's skin that hung too tightly on it's bones, and a few strands of hair on it's head that may have suggested it once may have been a female. It's throat was a complete mess like it was scratched at during the last few moments of it's life, it's neck barely even able to support it's brainless head. Her jaw was hanging down, as if unable to close, and the rows of rotten teeth were visible.

Some bumps were open and popped while some were pulsing, a sickly yellow fluid dripping out and spreading all over it's tinted green skin. It dampened the tattered cloth that used to be clothes that were draped across her body.

Victim of the Toxic.

It had one of it's legs bent at an odd angle and it shambled towards them all, going painfully slow as it dragged the probably broken leg behind them.

Look where the quarantine got them. It didn't work. Only hybrids were immune for some reason that only Notch knew and everyone else needed some other source of survival.

Nova sidestepped and lunged out, sword in front of him, and took out one of it's arms, it landing a bit away. It let out a half-gurgle half-scream as it wobbled towards Sly, the closest one, who nimbly jumped on top of it's shoulders and into a tree.

It seemed to be enraged, or at least as enraged as a rotting corpse could be, and swung wildly. Ze held his battleaxe defensively, and as the loose hand scratched at him, he deflected the strikes off using his axe.

With one swoop, he brought down the axe on top of it's head with a disgusting, wet-sounding noise. It cut through the skull and the already-soft flesh, revealing a few maggots that had already made their home in the dead body (and some chopped up maggots from the strike) and went through until the crotch, effectively slicing it into two.

Both sides flopped down.

Ze didn't know whether to roll his eyes or wonder how he didn't scream or vomit while fighting that.

The body was leaking the Toxic everywhere, but no one  _there_  had to worry about the sickness spreading to them. However, the sickness was spreading onto the grass and ground below and that looked gross in Ze's opinion, not to mention that it was quickly killing the grass underneath and doing the whole infect+reanimate combo on the boiled ants.

Alright, maybe zombie ants were kinda funny. A screwed-up brand of humor.

"All in favour of going into that dark, scary, building instead of being in the dark, scary outside?" Seamus spoke up after everyone was still staring at the body, still squirming with worms.

Nova shuddered and made hacking sounds while Sly was still up in the tree, having avoided the conflict.

"I'll assume that's a yes."

* * *

Going into the building was vaguely unnerving.

Being  _in_  the building was about the worst thing ever.

The air seemed as thick as half-solidified concrete in there, vines dangling down from the ceiling and tangling them up once in a while. It was darker than any night that they've seen (Ze  _did_  realise that nights were pretty bright thanks to the swirling galaxies and the belt of off-white stars and splashes of colours that dotted the darkened sky) and multiple times he swore that hands were coming up from the ground and trying to drag him back into the underworld.

Fun times.

Nova sneezed at the thick cloud of dust in the air, but that only succeeded in shooting up more. Cracked glass littered the floor and tubes ranging from all sizes were attatched to the walls, some broken open with a tinted-blue fluid all around it while others had the hatch open. Wires criss-crossed the entire area, from a mess on the floor, dangling from the ceiling, or inside the tubes waiting for something to claim them.

Sly bounced happily through the corridor, smacking all the tubes all throughout. None of them seemed to have any sort of human in them, so it was a relatively harmless activity, even though Seamus cringed and swore under his breath whenever Sly made a little too much noise for a stealth operation.

Ze just kept a close eye on the darkness. If this was a government base, that meant government goons - and not all of them were as lucky as Gassy and had a gas mask on them all the time.

No zombie jump scares  _this_  time around.

Trails of the cobalt mystery liquid streaked across the ground and set off an eerie, ice-blue glow (because of course, glowing things mean either science or some kind of Abyss-type magic) that illuminated and exagerrated everyone's expressions. Nova looked angry at the universe, Sly looked like he was having a whale of a time, Seamus looked even more sarcastic than normal, and Ze was almost 100% sure that he looked incredibly uncomfortable. Well, more uncomfortable than normal.

It led off into the back of the room, which they were all following Sly into. Hopefully there'll be piles upon piles of hot dogs, some sleeping bags, or maybe a flushable toilet.

The thought of food made Ze's stomach growl. The food (if some wheat thrown into a pot with water in it could be considered ' _food_ ') they prepared over the fire spilled over ages ago in the fight, and the effects of not eating some kind of dinner was starting to get to him. Notch, he hoped that Chilled was alright by himself. If previous encounters were anything to go by, he'd probably burned down their new house and the surrounding forest. That, or he'll just go to the (ruins of the) City of Machinima and check out Junkyard to see what eats he had in his house.

Junkyard, if that was even his name (Junk never really told them upfront and he had a nagging feeling that Chilled made up that name since he lived in a, you guessed it, junkyard) always had some type of food lying around. Good cook, too. The spaghetti Chilled brought home that one time from him was absolutely wonderful, even though he had to check for a variety of different poisons before eating it because all of the ingredients found in the spaghtti were currently extinct on the island. Still, that made him even hungrier.

He lives his normal life as if the Toxic never happened. He smells faintly of cooked food and spices. He  _seems_  to be a normal human. He's normal except for the fact that normal is definitely a sign of something being horribly off nowadays.

The hallway in front of that stopped, only two tubes being at the end instead of something useful like they wanted. One of them was opened, seemingly harshly since the doors were already off the hinges, but the other one was just covered with vines.

"Look at what we have here..." Nova rubbed his hands together and placed them on top of the glass, pressing his face and smooshing his nose against it.

Seamus tilted his head to the side, examining the intact one. "Still shining inside. Think there's something inside?"

"Some _one_ ," Sly corrected, looking the tube up and down, "Cyborgs and androids are people too!"

"Yeah," the shark hybrid rolled his eyes and snorted, "People assembled together from metal scraps they get from mines and have a computer for a brain."

Ze didn't add in anything, instead looking closer at the tube.

Above it, a nameplate stood against the test of nature, an engraved letter/number combo on top. Sly paused in front of it before swiftly leaping on top, fiddling around with what looked like some kind of opening mechanism and keypad before Nova shouted for him to, to quote him, "Get the fuck  _off_  before you accidentally set off a  _nuke_  or some shit!".

Ze eyed the engraving. Probably the serial code for the test subject, or perhaps some kind of rabid animal, inside -  _if_  there was somebody alive in there.

ALEKS - wait no, 4L3KS

Well that was confus-

The sound of air escaping out of an enclosed area snapped him out of his thought, the hatch for the tube swinging out and hitting Nova. The liquid fell onto the floor in front of them, unceremoniously splashing both Ze and Seamus and coating them with a blue glow. Sly hung upside-down from the top of the tube, peering into the newcomer's closed eyes and looked cautiously at the wires that still hung off his frame.

All the wires made a clicking sound and detatched from the subject, and when Sly finally dropped down onto the floor to give the rest of them a better view, Ze was pretty surprised at what he saw.

There was a strange metal helmet-like thing covering one part of his face, cracked and revealing the metal and wires underneath. Blue pieces of metal dotted the silver and two horn-antennae-things stuck out where his ears were suppose to be, probably transmitters. The code YL-4L3KS-HD was engraved onto his skin, leaving spaces where fat and flesh were visible,' and the same blue liquid that was currently soaking Ze's red sweater was pulsing through the wires on only his robotic arm like blood through veins.

It was a he, although his brown hair was pretty long. His skin was pale and had a spiraling tattoo that covered the entirety of his right arm, incomprehensible designs of colour and coding. He wore a black sweater except for the bright red letters "HD" as if making a statement, right sleeve ripped for some reason, and a pair of not grimy and dirty jeans.

He slowly opened his eyes (which were a uniform and drab brown) and surveyed the area, his eyes taking in the information after being awakened so rudely.

"Uhm." Sly smiled awkwardly and shuffled backwards, "My name's Sly, what's yours?"

The test subject opened his mouth and started screaming.


	4. //Noiseproof.yog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here it is. The part we actually want.

Sweaty hands hit the sterile white wall as a certain blond and goggle-wearing scientist pressed himself up again one of the many walls of YogLabs, squeezing his eyes shut as he felt something pass by lethally fast behind him, whipping up his hair and his burnt labcoat. A flash of white and a loud bang sounded in the distance, along with the heavy cloud of smoke that started rolling in his general direction.

He took a deep breath in and threw himself at the ground, scrambling forward using his two legs and occasionally his hands for balance. Heavy footsteps were right behind him, along with the swish-swish of brushes cleaning the floor to make sure no remnant of the blonde's blood were left by.

After all, Xephos wouldn't want Honeydew to worry.

Lalna brought up one of his hands to his mouth and nose, filtering out what he could of the smoke. It stung his eyes and made him tear up, blurring the world more when added onto the layer of smoke that hung around him, and -  _was that smoke green?!_

_Highly flammable. Don't touch that, Lalna. Don't get near that when there's a possible source of flame nearby._

Sputtering, he dove out of the way of another object that the cleaning bot was shooting at him, and caught a glimpse of a smooth, pointed object that he'd seen so many times before. Waged wars with them, was on the receiving end to them, built them and invented more. A missile - practically a second arm for Lalna, other than the power glove he attached onto the bloody stump of his natural arm.

(He got to admit, chopping his arm off from the elbow down wasn't very difficult. Not when pumped full of adrenaline and the need to live)

He could see a two faint lights in the distance, a terrifyingly bright blue. Blue used to be a colour of comfort, of the feeling of being  _safe_  and  _out of harm's way_ , but now it's just a reminder that trust should not be placed in the hands of a madman. What used to be such an inviting colour now seemed like unforgiving, merciless ice, a piercing gaze that always looked at him with accusation in his eyes.

Oh Notch, he couldn't be here. He wouldn't be here. Who would be taking care of Honeydew and leading him on like there was absolutely nothing wrong with murder and genetic testing?

_But I'm sure he dolls it up to seem like one big game._

Lalna brought his right arm up and fiddled around with the wires and metal bits and bobs that were a part of his body now, flipping a minuscule switch hidden under an alloy plate and watched the entire metallic arm buzz with electricity and start to turn around. All the fingers splayed out to reveal a carefully constructed laser end in the middle of the palm, deciding to risk the possibility of starting a bad-gas induced fire in his still-calculating mind.

The two lights turned away, looking in another direction. Lalna let out a breath that he didn't even know he was holding and brought down the arm and the laser ceased powering up. The metal casing was sturdy and had no visible seams, and the blonde was proud of the weeks he spent working on his little pet project. He could faintly hear the spaceman calling out to his dwarf friend, "Honeydew! Remember the drills! Remember the simulation!", overlapping with the fluctuating, scared screams from Honeydew.

"Oh Notch! Oh, Notch!"

"Don't take out the flint and steel, frien-"

A burst of flame erupted from that corner of the room, and Lalna instantly knew that the two were most definitely not walking out there alive. But they'll be up and at-em within a few hundred ticks in some other room, backups of them teleporting out from the underground room which even Lalna - a few days ago, a head scientist - was not able to reach.

_Stupid respawns. Stupid network. Stupid power symbol. Stupid blue._

It turned the corner and once the flame hit any of the green gas, it only fuelled it more. It only gained in speed as the fire kept on growing and growing, eating up all the gas and expanding it's red tendrils to consume more. The white, pristine walls were now covered with soot or blackened by the fire, and he internally thought how much cleaning the robots would need to do to get it off.  
Naturally, the flame was heading right for the frightened scientist.

Go forward and head towards a giant wall of fire that was quickly approaching, or go back and find himself face-to-face with an army of weaponised cleaning bots.

So, why not take a third option?

He used his feet and his hands to propel himself to the side as the lead robot fired off a missile, but a stray spark lit that side on fire and sent a torrent of metal pieces and flaming wire down upon them. The missile, loaded with whatever hyper-flammable gas that was contained within ( _smelled like eggs_ ) combined with the explosion sent off a chain reaction that left Lalna's ears ringing as he wedged himself into whatever room that he had just slammed one of YogLabs' durable and well-built doors, and the room shook with such force that the blonde swore that the ceiling was going to fall right on top of him and bury him under the rubble.

Slowly standing up and pressing a shaky hand onto the lock-door button (the door was more of a garage door, and Lalna barely had any time to slide underneath it and pull it down before the fire shot underneath the gap and burned him beyond recognition), he sat down on the ground, defeated. He couldn't hear anything, just an impression where he knew that there was suppose to be something, that there was suppose to be some sort of -  _something_  - going on in his head, but he could only hear his racing thoughts and bits and bobs of memories that floated by and flashed before his eyes, unable to grasp them fully but able to feel all the terror and nausea that the scene brought to him.

_Ruptured eardrum - may cause temporary hearing loss. Pain is different from person to person. Fluids that are watery, bloody, or pus start draining out after pain goes away. May experience tinnitus, ringing/buzzing in ears. Scratch that, I'm definitely getting that. Severely ruptured eardrums may mean dizziness or weakness to facial muscles. Mostly temporary hearing loss._

Symptoms and ways to treat it raced through his mind as he tried to make sense of what was happening, but succumbed to the constant flow of thought that being temporarily deaf gave to him. How could people stand the silence when everyone thought like this? All the time? He'd noticed it before when he was alone, but even then he had the comforting sounds of nature and his machines working dutifully away. Sometimes he'd hear the commotion of Honeydew Inc or Sjips Co.

There was nothing here but himself. It was so raw, so bare. Like nothing else.

_No need for extra treatments (Thank the gods, no way I'd be able to get medical supplies from the Medbay, not when the facility was practically under lockdown trying to find me), don't blow your nose too much._

His eyes flickered wildly from black space to black space, slowly adjusting to capture what light they could to give his brain a semi-clear picture.

A minecart system stood in front of him, one of the tracks already loaded with a minecart. There was darkness past that.

The room shook again from another explosion and Lalna looked warily from the tracks to the door.

Xephos had a fear of unknown minetracks, as stupid as that sounded.

Dying on a minecart ride into the darkness didn't seem like the best way to go for Lalna, but it was better than turning around into the charred remains of the hallway and getting captured by anyone, returning him to the experiments, and as Xephos happily described to him, "being uploaded to the mainframe".

 _The price of immortality is death_ , he said.

No way he was being converted to a machine, no doubt under Xephos' command forever.

Lalna knew Xephos did something with his respawns the moment ex-head scientist Lalna scampered off and made a run for outside. He joined YogLabs because they didn't ask questions and allowed him to experiment and test various electronics and other "science-y bullshit" as Honeydew  _kindly_  worded, but -

Everything he saw. What was beyond the metal doors and a reassurance from Xephos that nothing was wrong. That made even  _him_  heave and ask to go for a washroom break to vomit up his lunch.

He pushed himself upwards and cautiously wobbled towards the minecart, in case this was an elaborate trap and there were cleaning robots or maids lurking in the shadows and ready to stab needles into his bloodstream.

Nothing seemed out of ordinary, so he propelled himself forwards and leapt into the metal boat, fist punching the button. The minecart had a creaky start and Lalna was afraid that it would fall right off the track and into the dark underneath him that reminded him of the Abyss (and trust him when he says that he's been to the Abyss, or what's commonly called Limbo with the eyes and monoliths and the unnerving silence of it all) but it thankfully stayed upright as it made it's slow descent.

Lalna's eyes were slowly adjusting to the dim light, making out vague shapes of rocks and a bridge here and there, maybe a cobweb or a rather unusual looking rock in the corner. The minecart didn't look like it was going anywhere dangerous, but hopefully it lead out of the facility and into the wild where he'll set up a camp far away from here and make the most of what life he had left before YogLabs helicopters blew him into another dimension. Sometimes quite literally.

The hunk of rusted metal picked up speed, Lalna noticed, and it let out a high-pitched whine and shudder as it passed over a new piece of track. This part of it seemed slightly newer than the others. Probably just built.

The old track probably just dumped their helpless victim into the caverns below. Another security issue into the endless list of them.

Lalna sighed at his slow ride into freedom - he expected a bit more action, some more explosions, a few one-liners and Xephos screaming his name and swearing revenge as he strode off on an airship, putting on sunglasses and looking away from the explosion of YogLabs or something, not riding on a rusted bucket and having a pouty expression as he waited for it to carry him out and away.

He couldn't even hear the PA system frantically shouting for the employees to search the facility for him. That would be some nice entertainment.

Wait. The PA system is suppose to be connected everywhere in YogLabs.

This was either an abandoned part of YogLabs, which was unlikely since some of the railwork was new, or - oh  _right_ , he was deaf. He rolled his eyes at his fantasising of finding the old parts of YogLabs and unearthing long-buried secrets. A few documents on the anatomy of Xephos and where the alien came from and why he went from nice to  _absolutely off his rocker_  in a few months would suffice.

The minecart stopped.

"You stupid -" he stopped mid-sentence as he realised that yes, he was talking to an old minecart and groaned to the empty space in front of him, hauling himself out of the minecart and deciding that walking across a railway would be more efficient than riding that.

He didn't even make two steps before he was falling.

* * *

Every part of his body ached. Something tickled his face. The scent of nature was surrounding him, a punch in the face after all he got to smell was chemicals and medical supplies for the past few months.

Lalna shot open his deep blue eyes, scaring the butterfly that was crawling on his face. His body refused to cooperate with his brain to lift him out of the bush that he landed in, who decided to flop down and warm up a bit in the sun that was filtering through the forest above him. It was peaceful, and maybe if he still had his hearing he would hear birds chirping and small woodland creatures making noises at each other, and he decided that now was a time that he would be safe.

He started drifting off to sleep, eyelids drooping downwards, before his mind made a sudden realisation.

He was in a cave when he fell. This did not look like the dark, damp, smelly inside of a cave.

_Well, looks like I broke my neck when I hit the ground and instantly died, and now my holy soul went up to the Aether and I'll be sipping tea with Notch for the rest of my afterlife! Not the best outcome, but I'm not at Yoglabs, so that's a plus._

He mentally slapped himself out of his stupor and shoved a hand in his labcoat pocket for anything useful, pulling out a few syringes with plastic bits on the needles that he randomly grabbed in the Medbay raid. There were four in total - two were red, one was green, and one of them looked approximately like if steak, peas, and carrots were thrown into a blender, half-digested, then vomited up.

He had no idea what any of them did.

The best scientists tested on themselves, after all.

Banking his luck on one of the red ones, he used the inside of his sleeve to clean off one part of his other arm the best he could before carefully putting the three needles back into his pocket, leaving the one that would hopefully do something to help in his current situation. He removed the plastic and dropped it onto the forest floor before bringing up the needle and pressing it into his arm, putting pressure on the top bit to force all of the red liquid out.

He paused.

Did science work on ghosts? He cursed himself under his breath for not taking a few more magic lessons when Rythian was still around.  _I bet ancient spells work on ghosts._

Lying back down out of defeat for the second time that day, he took time to survey his immediate surroundings. It looked like any other slice of forest, trees, bushes, foliage, normal things. The Aether was suppose to have blue-green grass and weird looking trees with gold on them, clouds that you could pick up, and flying whales. He really wished that he would see a flying whale some day, they sounded cool.

Then again, how did they know how the Aether looked like if they weren't dead? Maybe the Aether looked exactly like how the Overworld looked like.

Out of the corner of his eye, something that looked decidedly man-made was perched on a clearing of a forest, a few yells emanating from the clearing.

How didn't he notice that yelling before? Notch, whoever they were - they sounded male - were even louder than Honeydew's cries of happiness whenever he saw something cute.

He looked back to the empty syringe and placed his free hand on his ear. There was some fluid trickling out, what was suppose to happen when his ear cleared out a week or two later.

Of course. Instant healing.

It wasn't the easiest way to take it in, and Lalna preferred if it was something other than jabbing a needle into your arm, like a drink or one of those vitamin gummy bears.

Popping the plastic bit back on, he put it in his pocket for disposing of later. It was a hazard, after all.

A branch cracked in front of him, from the direction of the shouting. He froze and snapped his head up, different ways of fighting, bargaining, and fleeing running through his mind. The mystery men seemed happy in their shouting (why didn't he listen closer to what they were saying?! Stupid, stupid.), but he had to be careful.

The the cracking sound came from his left side. Now he was elated on his decision to take his chances with the needles, as being deaf in this strange world of afterlife would probably mean his...second death? Could someone even do that?

He felt himself being quickly pushed to the ground, unable to fight back whatever was fighting him. He turned his head to see a mass of brown fur and a gaping jaw full of teeth and saliva, ready to snap down at any squishy part of the blonde's body (which was mostly everything). Of course it would be Lalna's luck to run into a brown bear on his first day of the afterlife.

To Lalna's surprise and relief, it didn't kill him immediately, instead lifting one of it's paws off his face and turning his head to look at him.

"Got you, Gavi-hey! Who's this?!"

Lalna gasped in surprise at the brown bear speaking. It was that thing that was speaking, right? It opened it's mouth and a voice came out of it as he made talking motions. It had a strange accent, similar to the ones in the Team Crafted territory when he was sent there for a diplomatic trip. It was hard to describe, but one key difference was that they pronounced a lot of their Ah sounds like Ay or a similar harsher-sounding sound.

"Geoff? This part of the Lets Play?"

"Hello?" he pressed himself against the forest floor, rock jabbing uncomfortably in his side as he squeaked out that word. The brown bear had a vest and a backpack on, along with a belt with various tools. The bear DID seem to have a communicator and an inventory, but they were older models that were long outdated and the bulky tech hung awkwardly from the bear's head.

Lalna let out a quick draw of breath as he made the connection that he was probably on one of the uncharted, feral islands out from the mainland. Digging in his memory, he remembered a quick  _vworp-vworp_  sound of a portal as he fell from the track into the cave.

"Hey, you even sound like Gavin!" the brown bear smiled, showing off all of his teeth, which made Lalna even more uncomfortable. "Maybe you're his long-lost brother or something."

Lalna screamed internally.

"Michael?"

The footfalls of two more people approaching their position were apparent, one person with a biking helmet perched on top of his head and one person in a tuxedo with a rose in hand appeared from his left. The one with the green biking helmet and heavy-looking armour pushed his microphone (which was bulky and still visible, unlike the implants that everyone in the Yogs Territory got) up to his mouth and started shouting for the rest of them to come to his coords or check their map (maps?! Like, physical,  _paper_  maps?). The one with the stylish suit and rose waved his hand towards Lalna before jumping playfully on top of who he assumed was "Michael" the bear, burying his face in the fur and adding another layer of discomfort as their body weight pressed against him.

"Oi, get off me!"

The bear snickered and mumbled something under his breath and sounded suspiciously like "he even says oi, too!"

Lalna sighed, exasperated. This was getting him nowhere. "Come on, who are you guys anyway?" he said through gritted teeth.

"You've never heard of us?" a new one, one with an accent that was familiar to the ones in the Yogs Territory and clad in a creeper-like outfit said (probably Gavin, as he was the only one here so far that didn't sound like someone out of the Team Crafted territory or Asgard).

Lalna held back an angry scream.  _Of_ ** _course_** _I haven't heard of you, that's why I asked!_

The group looked at him seething with rage and shrugged, taking that as a no. One of them, who had a red plaid kilt (which, amusingly, was stained with blood. Another mad scientist in the making) stood off to the side while the rest of them (including the bear, thank Notch) formed a goofy cartoon-esque pose.

"We're the Achievement Hunters!"


	5. //City of Emptiness.yog

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took so long to write/post this! This time around, I have chapter 6 already finished, so it shouldn't take 4 months to post it. 
> 
> (Thanks for the nice comments, too! I'm glad that it's easy enough to get a hang of the characters without actually knowing which YouTubers they are)

Lalna could only stare blankly at the odd group in front of him. If it wasn't for the fact the healing syringe worked, he would have questioned his current mental state. The " _Achievement Hunters_ " were still in their pose, the bear looking very uncomfortable with two of them using his body as the bottom of the pyramid, and all of them were looking at him expectantly. The one with the kilt gave an apologetic smile and backed off so he stood closer to the shadows.

"...So?" Lalna tilted his head, his eyebrows raised and arms crossed. The one with the creeper suit threw up his arms in exasperation and let out a whine, leaving him open for the bear to smile and show all of his teeth before bucking the man clean off of him.

"Oh, forget it." The leader hauled himself off of the bear and stood on the grass about a block away from Lalna, motioning for the others to either step off their friend or go a bit farther away. "Geoff", as the blond had gleaned from the brief conversation when he was first found, stood forward with a sly smile and a lazy expression on his face and stuck his hand out in a greeting, his tattoos visible on his arm from in-between his armour chunks. The complex pictures inked onto his tanned skin didn't have any meaning that Lalna could see, or any indication of where he was or what organisation they might work for.

Lalna scooted forwards before lifting himself up and gripping his hand, scraping his memory to remember the days when he actually needed to shake hands with the Council at the meetings.

 _Web to web, remember to be firm and commanding, looks like he'll have a limp handshake, figures they're all primitives anywa-_ , he held back a gasp as Geoff almost crushed his hand and stole a quick glance towards Geoff's facial expression. Still as lazy as before - but was that a hint of mischief in his eyes? His arm looked loose, too. Perhaps a spy? Notch, he was impossible to read. Lalna forced a smile onto his lips and nodded curtly, his hand aching.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Michael snicker. At least, it looked like snickering. HybridPanda was one of the..... _residents_  of YogLabs, but Lalna had never payed much attention to him when there was science to be done in other quadrants.

 _And inhumane experiments to conduct_ , he thought darkly, worming his hand out of Geoff's tight grip. "Anyway, sorry for the interruption, I better be, uh, going now. You guys have fun doing whatever you guys were doing!"

"Go where?" Geoff was still smiling as he said that, and Lalna had more evidence than he needed to form the conclusion that he was up to something sinister, "We're surrounded by water."

He froze, his worst fears confirmed. In his mind he had made this part of the world somewhere connected to the mainland - somewhere where he would still be in control. Instead, the dimension rift opened up in some unexplored, pre-Technic island. Unexplored until now, at least. A small voice at the very back of his mind piped up -  _he's right. There's no place to go. You're not going back to YogLabs, are you?_

 _And stay with these...._ bozos _? That might possibly be out for your blood?_

_YogLabs._

_Fine._

"What I  _meant_  to say is," he brought a hand up to the back of his neck and tried his best to look like a clumsy, forgetful fool who would routinely get killed on the first day of work, "I'll be happy to stay with you and your group!"

Geoff smiled serenely again, his constant happy mood reminiscent of drug-addled experiments that sometimes broke loose from their cages in a drunken stupor, their minds too far off in another world to fully comprehend what they were doing or how many sentient beings they ripped apart in order to get coffee from the admittedly still-broken coffee machine. Lalna hated cleaning up after them. Being the head of experiments like that usually had him stuck with overseeing mopping up the aftermath.

The rest of his group whispered to themselves off in the corner, a few snippets of conversation such as "Ryan, you are not keeping our esteemed guest in The Hole" (The Hole was spoken with a sense of importance, so in his mind it must have been good enough to warrant capital letters), "Kerry's already staying in my house" and "no, he can't stay inside the pig butt". Their friendship wasn't forced, wasn't fake, that was for sure - back when Lalna was with Honeydew and Xephos at the Jaffa Factory, they were like this. A group of furnace-forged friends that laughed together, shared memories with each other, and played as much as they worked on that colossal monolith of a factory.

Then came Site Bee. Then YogLabs. Then...whatever  _this_  was.

The group off in the corner started fighting with themselves. Probably over something stupid. Another jolt of nostalgia raced through Lalna, unexpected sadness from the old times coursing through his mind.

A loud cough shut everyone up, though. Geoff radiated a sense of importance and leadership, and Lalna had to stop himself from freezing in his tracks and looking up to see what the armour-clad man was about to say. "Since you guys," his finger drew circles around the rest of his friends and he gave a 'you-know-how-it-is' expression that was normally reserved for unruly children to Lalna, "Won't make up your minds for the next cycle, I think that Lalna will be staying in my house."

Lalna was positively giddy. A king-like figure such as Geoff would obviously have the best, biggest house out of them all, and Lalna wouldn't mind sleeping in an actual bed for once instead of passing out on a console or resting in the air vents for once.

"Thank you! I mean, uh, thanks for letting me stay. I'm so, so,  _so_ ," Lalna stretched on the sentence to make sure it really hit home how humble and caring and  _yes-you-should-give-me-items-for-free_  he was, " _so_  grateful for this gift."

The bear and the man with the creeper suit started snickering. The one with roses opted for a less incognito route and started laughing out loud.

Lalna ignored them. They were probably ranked very low in whatever civilisation they had here.

"So, what are your names?"

* * *

 

Lalna walked near the front of the group, right next to Geoff, as they went towards the Achievement Hunter's houses. Thank Notch that Lalna had great memory and an even better perception, or he'd never be able to tell the guys apart, especially Ryan and Jack. What were they, brothers? Of course, Jack was almost certainly some kind of dwarf because of his long, ginger beard not unlike Honeydew's, so maybe a dwarf/human relationship, or a freak mutation that caused them to be tall and for Ryan not to have a glorious mane. That would explain the height.

There weren't any road to follow, so he had to take everyone's word on which direction they were going. Every once in a while, they hit a landmark - and by once in a while, Lalna meant every few feet. The civilisation must really, really love to build things, although from the density of all the stuff Lalna wondered why he couldn't see anyone else, or why there weren't any roads. Surely he must have seen someone by now, or they're just good at hiding. Or invisible.

They had recently passed the " _No Petting Zoo_ " and entered the snow fields after going through the " _Bunker of Destiny_ " (an archaic way of grinding mobs. Why wait for them to spawn in a stone monolith when you can get spawner? Or even have to go in there? Even an exp farm, which it seemed to be used for as suggested by the enchanting book nearby, would be easier to make), and before that, picking up Lalna from the " _Shag Tent_ ".

A little odd, but Lalna wasn't a person to quick to judge. He preferred being with someone for a few days to get a taste of what they were like before bailing.

Gavin was riding on the back of the bear-Michael.  _Manners, Lalna_. Ray was hanging on the underside of Michael, and every once in a while his suit would scrape against a rock or a bush.

It was quiet. Awkwardly quiet. "Hey, why hasn't anybody else come out of their houses yet?"

"Kerry and Lindsay are out building something on another island. Joel has been missing for a long time now."

Lalna waited for Geoff to continue. At first, he was in awe at the King's memory since he seemed to know every single subject he had, but now that awe turned into a sinking feeling in his gut as time went on and Geoff had no indication that he had any more to say.

"Uhm, what about everyone else?"

He started laughing. A good laugh, Lalna admitted, but still not an answer. "Ha ** _ha_** -oh, you're serious."

"You didn't, uh, dispose of them, right?"

"What " _them_ "?" Geoff rolled his eyes and continued forward, sidestepping out of a way of a tree. Michael walked under the tree so Gavin would get hit by a branch. Ray was still clinging on, maybe sinking a bit further into the fur. Ryan and Jack were keeping an eye out for any mobs that were hiding in the shade.

It took a bit of staring for Lalna to finally get what Geoff was trying to say to him.

Lalna chose not to prod any further.

"Uh, on another note, what's your house like?"

Geoff whipped his head to look at Lalna (scaring him a bit) with an odd twinkle in his eye. Michael had stopped in his tracks as a sudden realisation of something went over him and he started grinning. Not a good sign.

"Ah, don't want to ruin the surprise for you."

"So it's a dinky shack and I'll be sleeping on the leaky floor." the blonde hoped that he could pry a bit out of him, "Fantastic."

"I can tell you one thing about it, and it's that the house is in  _no way_  small."

Now everybody was grinning, even Jack and Ryan. Definitely not a good sign. Hopefully Geoff's house wasn't a gigantic Nether Portal and he would have to put up with pigmen and fire for the rest of his stay.

The snow fields stretched on for ages, and Lalna was glad that he brought his white labcoat with him. It kept out most of the chills, but not all - he could feel the wind nipping at his ears and, more importantly, he couldn't feel his toes. At all.

The sun slid down in front of them, and Lalna squinted for the off chance that he might be able to see the mainland. Nothing, just miles and miles of blue seas and cool-looking aquatic animals. An island here or there. In the distance, a giant tree was being built - a treehouse? Probably whatever Kerry and Lindsay were working on, but Geoff pointed in the opposite direction when he was talking about them...

A cloud rolled up from the south, dark grey and ominously slow. In the matter of fact, it was travelling towards them the same pace that they were walking. And it was cubic. It reached upwards towards the skies, disappearing out of his view - it must run right towards the limit where a normal human couldn't build anymore because of the lack of air. It struck him as odd. Thunderclouds didn't look like tha-

Oh.

Oh  _Notch_.

" _Please_  don't tell me that's your house."

All of them burst into laughter. Geoff first, then Michael, Gavin, and Ray, then Jack and Ryan.

"It.  _Is_. Why would-" he made motions towards all of them, flailing wildly, "Just you-the  _materials_ -island- _limited_ -the coal and  _time_ -oh my  _GOD_  you guys are-"

He clutched at his throat and let out a hoarse scream. They could have  _DIED_  making that thing. Maybe that's where everyone went, and these were the remnant of a civilisation that was killed because their King wanted to make a giant stone dong as his house. Overcompensating for something, much?

"Don't-" Geoff started but had to pull himself together from another laughing fit, "worry. Respawn."

That was even worse.

YogLabs satellite plant, of course, how could Lalna be so forgetful? To be honest, he wasn't paying attention when Xephos was explaining that he was setting up bases on the islands and Asgard (which mysteriously became an island soon afterwards).

Geoff winked. "You might not have it where you come from - genius tech, really."

_What?_

"Scan someone's structure and keep it into a computer, vomit it out when someone dies! Keeps their consciousness, unlike clones." he tapped his head.

"No, no, it's just, uh." Lalna was temped to scream if they were affiliated with YogLabs or he had the luck to land on an island with their own respawn, which made him immune from Xephos shutting his down, "You made it.  _Yourself_."

"Well, really, Ryan and I made it. Lindsay worked on the concepts, but she couldn't help build it." the man with armour brought his hands up to his shoulders and started making tiny flapping motions with them, "Flippers and all."

"Lindsay is a fish?!"

"Penguin."

"Can she talk?"

Geoff made an "uh, duh" face. Yes, of  _course_  penguins and bears would be able to talk. Lalna hoped that he wouldn't have to put up with singing woodland creatures or his meal yelling for help.

The crunches of snow gave way for the soft sound of grass, and soon what looked like a road came into view. Gravel was mixed with dirt for a rudimentary, but functional path. There were glowstone lamps on either side of them, held aloft by fences. Dense overgrowth and trees littered the area. How did primitives like these have respawn systems?

"So can I use it?"

"The washrooms? They're on the right side."

"No, no, respawn."

"I don't see why not."

Geoff shrugged while laughing. Lalna didn't find anything funny.  _This better not be an elaborate plot where I put my guard down and they kill me under the false assumption that respawn works._

"Let me get to my house. I think I have a few spare..."

Lalna shot a quick glance at the towering monolith that was now blocking most of the sky. They were right in front of it now - the eerie blankness of the stone wall contrasted with one single iron door. A dirt house was attached to one side of it, with a painting of Kung-Fu plastered on it. Faint moos, chicken clucks, and pig snorting came out of there, along with a feeling a dread and doom that could only be matched by the deepest archives of YogLabs.

There must be hundreds of floors in that thing. How the hell is he going to find one  _microchip_?

Geoff clicked the button that unlocked the iron door with flourish. "Welcome to my not-so-humble abode, dear guest!"

Lalna....wasn't sure what to say.

The entire thing was empty, except for a bed that stood on the opposite end.

_These people were just full of surprises, weren't they._

The moon rose up and soon the all-to-familiar sound of mobs came to be. Everyone except for Geoff and Lalna were tucking in for the night. Ryan, or maybe Jack, was cooing to someone - or some _thing_  - called Edgar.

"Where do I sleep?" he asked simply. He was at a loss of words.

"I'll get another bed. Want a temporary room before we set up your place to stay? Achievement City's real estate is booming!"

Lalna just nodded.

Geoff beamed again. 


	6. //Blood and Water.tc

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick and short update, sorry if it's a bit lackluster (the next one should hopefully be better..with...I'm actually not sure if I should stay with Team Crafted or switch to Creatures+Friends)

The air inside the sound-sealed room was stale, even though the room itself looked pristine and just like new. The room was white, almost retina-burning, with a high roof with a circular skylight in the middle. Mirrors adorned the walls, high enough for Sky to see his entire body but not high enough to reach the ceiling. A long, mahogany table with carvings of a serpent with mountains and lakes atop it's body, a chimera poised for battle, and some kind of weird blob thing with too many eyes to count circled the sides of the top, signifying the main three religions. A few other miscellaneous beasts were carved in between the main three.

The elected Council members, people to represent the masses. Sky, Deadlox, TrueMU, Xephos, some slime person named...Alsmiffy? A representative of the subterritory Skylands above the Yogs, and two new guys. A few of the spots were empty. A given, since Asgard was ex-communicated, but the chair that normally held the slumped form of Lalna had nobody behind it. The seats stood around the table with the Council standing behind their own, all still except for two.

The first was Sky. He could feel the sweat building on his palms and his suit clinging onto him like a second skin. Half of his nervousness stemmed from being in front of important people, and the other half came from replaying worst-case scenarios in his head, where things such as sudden meteor strikes happened. He wished that he was in his normal athletic armour instead of the glorified cage they called a 'business suit' that he was wearing.

The second was the leader of one of the new continents they discovered, DaveChaos of ChaosVille. Sky wondered if his name was Dave of ChaosVille, shortened to Dave _Chaos_ , or if ChaosVille was named after him, and made a mental note of asking him when the conditions weren't so stressful. The blue mage robe he wore with crimson jewels on top of his shoulders was draped across him elegantly, with the back rippling from unused magic, but a closer look would reveal that he was fidgeting under the oversized sleeves and his eyes were darting around the room, sometimes fixating on somebody before moving on to look at someone else. One of his subjects stood next to him, wearing similar robes. His name was Kirin, or something?

Both of them were obviously mages. Sky didn't care much for magic, as it was recently outlawed in this Territory, but as long as the other Territory's actions didn't affect anyplace here then Sky had no say in what was banned there.

They were in an undisclosed location somewhere in the Crafted Territory, different barriers both magical and scientific put up to ward off anybody dumb enough to try and take a peek, and Sky was hosting. He gave a curt nod before signalling for everyone to sit, waiting for everyone to pull out their chair (whether it be simply taking it out with their hands or using magic to levitate it behind them) before sitting down himself. Hopefully nobody could see how nervous he was, but from the level gaze of Xephos from the other end of the table, Sky could only hope that nobody would make a show and exploit that weakness.

The table was smooth under his fingers, and to take his mind off of current matters, he traced his nail over the serpent's head and mentally made a plead to the serpent to let the meeting go well.

Sky was by no means religious (he put all his faith in himself and his own skills), and the Holy Trio (or Holy Duo plus the Unholy Blob depending on which set one followed, or for the people devoted to the old ways, the Holy Quad) haven't been seen since the Aether Fell, but there was no doubting that whatever kind of super-evolved species they were, they had immense power. And that if he didn't put some work into putting some kind of symbolic carvings in the room the Council would throw a hissy fit.

Deadlox coughed.

"Oh! Yeah, so, we're gathered here today to talk about recent events...." the pause behind those words felt like an hour to Sky. He had already made the meeting awkward within the first sentence. That had to be a new record. "Anyone want to start?"

"Nothing to report from ChaosVille." Dave piped up from the side. His accent was new to Sky's ears, and it took him a bit to figure out what he was trying to say. The first time around it sounded more like 'nuhfen tah rehport furum ChaosVille'. Sky stopped his grimace that started to form on his face and gave Dave an apologetic look.

"On the contrary," Xephos chose his words carefully, speaking them slowly to add more emphasis, "I heard reports of unusual thunderstorms coming from that area from some of my.... _colleagues_."

Dave stiffened up the moment Xephos started speaking.

Sky would _kill_ to be able to read minds at that current moment.

"Would you care to elaborate?" Sky had to stop himself from adding on a quip like 'not all of us have mind-reading powers (unfortunately)' lest he get another glare from the blue-eyed spaceman and a few malfunctions in the equipment YogLabs gave to him.

"Lightning strikes. A lot of them, actually." Deadlox and a few other people rolled their eyes, but Xephos quickly shut them up with his next words before anyone could speak, "But don't you find it odd that there's no rain falling?"

"If you're going to try and accuse Dave of doing something obviously evil because  _there's a lot of lightning_ , please do it on your own time." Deadlox matched Xephos' even, bored tone before pushing his headphones closer to his ears.

Dave said nothing. Sky held up a glass of water to his mouth to try and replace all the water he was sweating out.

"I think someone in ChaosVille is practicing blood magic."

Kirin started scowling, tilting his head to the side. Sky almost shot the water he was drinking through his nose. It instead came up halfway his throat and he managed sputter out,"Well, that's a big leap in logic!"

"With enough sacrifices, a blood mage would be able to summon lightning for offensive or defensive purposes. Added with the fact of disappearing wildlife in the area and Dave's sudden isolation, when he use to go on adventures with his friends all the time, indicates that there's something wrong." Xephos started explaining instead of vaguely making threatening gestures, finally, for _Notch's_ sake, "Your evil-looking tower doesn't help."

"Oh, come on! I get Gar to put on red fumes on my tower and change it up a bit and suddenly everyone's thinking I'm trying to summon demons?!" even under the hood, Sky could see Dave's face scrunched in anger and his body posture indicating that he was doing all he could to hold back a sudden display of anger. Something the Xephos would use for 'evidence'. "What're you going to say next?! Sky's a hybrid?"

Kirin was sputtering now, sometimes speaking sentence fragments but failing.

Xephos narrowed his eyes.

"Wh- _what_? How did I get dragged into this?"

"You didn't! It was an example! Wait, let me try that agai-"

"Excuse me?"

"Uh, everyone, weren't we suppose to be talking about something el-"

"Xephos, where's Lalna?"

Kirin smiled as the question he asked hit Xephos. Everyone went quiet. They haven't thought of it, and assumed that Lalna was late, like always. From the start, the attention had been shifted away from the missing blonde, and that manipulation stopped now.

"He-" for once, it was Xephos' turn to stumble over his words. "He's missing."

Sky snorted. Everyone here seemed to have their own little secrets. "What, he decided to bail and ran off?"

Sky began to laugh, watching everyone else, but quickly stopped when he realised that Xephos was staring at him with an open-eyed gaze that told him that he had hit the nail right on the head.

"Where're your spies?" Xephos' tone was cold. Sky could feel more sweat against his skin, and decided against telling him that he had guessed the answer. Better to let your enemies think you were some kind of strategic genius, right?

"W-what, I'm not going to tell you so you can hunt them down!"

"So you admit to having spies?"

"Do  _you_  admit to one of your top scientists running off?"

A standoff. Neither of them were going to budge from their current position.

Dave and Kirin breathed sighs of relief as the accusations of blood magic were quickly forgotten in wake of Sky and Xephos' fight.

Dave lowered his head in an attempt to look smaller, and raised his hand up to get permission to speak. Sky nodded, still not looking away from Xephos. "Can we just forget this happened and continue another day?"

Deadlox pushed his headphones down, the lack of incoherent shouting piquing his interest. Kirin's eyes shifted between Xephos and Sky before nodding in agreement. Smiffy didn't talk much in the meeting, surprisingly, but mumbled that it was going nowhere. TrueMU's face was unreadable, as always, since he had a helmet on top of his head.

Sky narrowed his eyes beneath his sunglasses, removing his hands from the table (he wasn't even aware that he had slammed them), and fiddling with the chain of his amulet around his neck, tucked underneath his suit. The look on Xephos' face was venomous, seemingly innocent but having a layer of hate and anger underneath.

"Meeting adjourned."

Sky swore that he could see Xephos' mouth curve into a slight smile.

Nobody noticed that Xephos had skilfully moved the topic away from getting YogLabs checked on, even forcing an early finish.

Neither did anybody notice that Dave did the exact same thing with the accusation of blood magic.

* * *

 

The water was lukewarm in the tub, chilly to some, but Sky didn't mind it at all. He quietly undressed (the amulet and sunglasses remained on) and sat in the tub, the window ajar and the noises of late city activities filtering in and calming him down. He just needed to cool off after that disaster of a meeting. Nothing simple done, much less doing something about YogLabs. Just a bunch of shouting and nervous sweating.

He didn't know why Deadlox made such a big deal with that lot. Him and his overdramatic speeches and melodramatic thoughts, maybe he should just  _lie down_  and  _smell the roses,_ maybe shove them  _right_  up his nostrils (or other holes) because  ** _WOW_** _does that guy need a chill pill_  for once instead of coming to Sky to whine about something else.

He rubbed his forehead to stop the wave of uncontrollable anger that was crashing through him. He tried to focus on his surroundings instead of the murderous thoughts that were passing through his thoughts.

The bathroom was pristine, white tiles with budder decorations every now and then. There was a shower nearby, but right now Sky just wanted a comfortable soak instead of standing beneath a torrent of water that was always too hot, or perfectly fine at the start and absolutely boiling near the end.

A mirror was attached on a nearby wall and he slowly took off his sunglasses, putting them on the ground.Despite the city known for being the brightest in the entire continent, it's ruler couldn't stand bright lights at all. He winced as the light reflecting off the white tiles assaulted his vision and squinted.

_I swear to Notch, if this city wasn't already so built up I'd re-make it to be less gaudy. More dark tones._

He sighed, leaning back and taking off the band the held his ponytail, letting hair go down to his shoulders.  _But, of course, the expectations are too high for that._

Everybody in the city knew that their gold-eyed leader was the definition of bravery and resistance, mowing down squids whenever they tried to gain territory. Everybody but him.

1\. His eyes were a bland navy blue. The sunglasses tinted them a striking yellow, and he rarely took them off because of the lights.

2\. He was scared silly of squids.

3\. Killing squids that might be innocent just for being there was inhumane, in Sky's opinion.

He scratched a rough spot on his back near the shoulder blade, lost in thought as the sounds of people's lives went on. Briefly, he wondered what his friends were doing - he hadn't heard from Seto in a while.

The last time they spoke was right before the incident.

Right before magic was deemed unstable and dangerous.

"Hey, Sky?" TrueMU's voice drifted in from somewhere outside his room. They all lived in the  _Zeus_  tower, so it was a common site to see one of them go into another's room.

"I'm relaxing right now! Need some quiet time!"

A pause.

"And just so you know, I'm in the bath! I'm not masturbating!"

"Well, get out of the bath, then!"

"Has someone died? Does someone need medical attention? Someone make another squid-human hybrid?"

"Not yet, maybe, and why would you even ask the last question? Look, it's important."

Sky groaned and sunk lower into the depths of his tub.  _Every. Single. Time._  There was always something important or world-changing and he wouldn't get any time to himself and then _what_ would happen when he went to check what it was? Sitting around doing nothing, because the problem wasn't that important or world-changing after all. He knew that TrueMU would have to drag him out, naked if it went down to that, so he put on the amulet and sunglasses he left lying around as a precaution.

"On a scale of I-lost-my-sock important to the-world's-ending important how bad is it?" 

A shuffle, a cough. Barely audible, but Sky caught it.  _Higher than lost-my-sock, then._

"Seto's-opened-an-abyssal-portal important."


	7. //Nightbreak, Void

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm dropping so many hints to one specific thing I might as well fly a banner over the city that states what it is

It took a few hundred ticks for Sky's mind to fully process what his friend just told him.

_A...what? A portal? He's...?_

His eyes stared blankly at the bottom of the tub through the tinted screen of his sunglasses. He was suffocating in air, unable to draw in breath.

_Seto was serious?_

Images of his friend's body twisted into a more demonic form, a shell of what he once was, flashed through his head. How many limbs would he have gained by the time they reached him? Would he have any? Would they even be able to identify the body?

What would it be this time? Extra mouths, extra eyes, the possibilities were endless.

( _oh god don't think about his body bursting at the seams with flesh and blood don't_ )

It was surreal.

He didn't even realize he had propelled himself towards the door until his hand rested on the doorknob.

"Oh thank god you're here, I was worried that-" a wheezing sound came from his air filters, and a strange bubbling sound that Sky always heard around him. Oh well, aliens. "Notch, I knew you were suppose to act fast, but at least put on something!"

Sky looked down and - oops. A towel was quickly thrown on, and Sky shuffled forwards to where he left his armour on the floor. His feet almost slipped on the too-polished floor and he let out a few choice swears under his breath. He could hear his friend from outer space mumbling about how his vision receptacles were tarnished and could never be clean from that — Sky guessed that this was the first time that TrueMU had ever seen anybody not from his species naked. Hopefully he wouldn't tell anybody about this incident.

Once he slipped into his athletic armour and ran over to TrueMU, already annoyed and tapping the shoe part of his all-covering spacesuit (a facade to cover his worry over Seto please let him be okay), he nodded. It looked like only the two of them were going.

A quick recon mission. Jump in, jump out, and if death met them smack-dab in the face, he would just respawn right back at his house. The lingering feeling of death always followed him each respawn - nobody ever remembered their death, from the fact that the memory wasn't stored in the backup yet, but that emptiness where you _knew_ that your existence was suppose to cease, go to the Nether or Aether or whatever, was downright creepy. It was another sacrifice to live forever.

A budder sword hung on a rack as they ran through the hallway towards the elevator down, and Sky's hand reached out to grab it, his gloved hands grasping around the carved hilt.

Unfortunately, he also took the rack down with it. The crack echoed throughout the hallway, and another clang as Sky shook the remaining mechanism of the clasp off. Sky grimaced.

"What the feck?"

That accent. Dave had heard them, and from the corner of his eye he could see Dave poking out his head to check up on them, eyes widened in curiosity.

A window was coming up. Now that he thought about it, an elevator would be slow, and a bit boring. Why stand around in a stuffy room while you could be leaping across the tops of buildings? He watched as TrueMU activated his back and boot thrusters and steered into the window, glass shattering instantly on impact. Sky brought up both of his gauntlets over his face and tumbled out, the glass only glancing him. Wind pushed against his body as he felt himself start free falling, mentally and physically preparing himself for impact. If he could reach the pool right there, he wouldn't have to take the bruise (2 hearts of damage, his UI said. not that bad. A mere projection of his current health, and it wasn't unheard of for a person with 0 hearts to still stay alive, albeit with life-threatening injuries to the point where they died a few minutes afterwards, but it was mostly accurate).

A skyscraper's roof drew near, and Sky braced for impact. In his head, he drew out a path for him to take, leaps from balcony to railing to roof to balcony again already planned before he hit the roof. He could almost feel his feet pounding against the concrete and marble, bringing out his hands to grab at something to swing in a wildly different direction, or to preform tricks for style. His alien friend had it safe, but boring.. He briefly thought of what it was like, flying everywhere - people turning to dots underneath you, and the feeling of freedom, the blue of the landscape as you went wherever you felt like going, as long as you had the fuel to. The missing aspect of parkour and the sudden ease of it. It was like cheating.

Now that he thought about it, he felt the same nausea that he was imagining. the roof wasn't coming any closer and the glass floated in place.

This wasn't his own mind slowing everything to make his hits more precise. Lights blinked. Traffic travelled along their paths beneath him on the roads. The city was alive - not in a literal sense, of course, but it thrummed with chatter and the buzz of electronics, pulsed with lights, powered by that Notch-forsaken company YogLabs.

He strained to look at his back, or move anything, but whatever force was holding him kept a tight grip. His arms felt like they were squeezed by a vice.

"I'm going to ask again, what're you two doing?!"

Of course. Dave was a mage, and most likely didn't know of the ban. "Can you loosen up, please? Or put me down? I can't-" he felt the grip near his lungs tighten for a bit before slowly releasing, "-breath."

The glass surrounding him shot outwards with inhumane speed, flying off into the wilderness. Hopefully people won't complain about having to pick glass pieces out of their fish. Or complain about having to remove a glass piece out of their thigh.

The magic subsided, but kept him floating. He pushed himself so he would face the window that he leapt out of, the feeling of pushing on nothing but having a force in it eerie and unnatural. A faint blue glow tinted the world to an ugly green colour, mixing with the budder decorations to create an eyesore. To be honest, it was pretty much an eyesore already. TrueMU paused in the distance, the flames shooting downwards. if he said anything, he couldn't hear.

His sunglasses flickered to life the moment he thought that, and couldn't regret it more.

TrueMU: sky  
TrueMU: what are you doing  
TrueMU: Seto, remember?  
TrueMU: are you floating  
TrueMU: you didn't tell me you were also a mage  
TrueMU: why aren't you moaning  
TrueMU: wait  
TrueMU: *moving damn that autocorrect  
TrueMU: pure yoglabs evil  
TrueMU: no seriously are you okay  
TrueMU: am I hallucinating this?  
TrueMU: do I need to get my visor cleaned?  
TrueMU: let me use some symbols to display the human emotion of anger, of which I am feeling  
TrueMU: :[

The text bombarded his vision and he winced, Dave shooting him a worried, maybe confused look, the magic spires his robe devolved into spikes pointed upwards like a frightened cat and letting off loose energy sparks, watching his sunglasses dotted with the white pixelated text. His neural connection started typing for him, and - _I am not calling TrueMU a son of a squid please backtrack that_ \- a message was formed in a matter of ticks.

SkyTheKidRS: dave's got me  
TrueMU: should I blast him? I think I should be able to hit him, with minor damage to the building beside you guys.  
SkyTheKidRS: he's a mage  
TrueMU: wow, haven't realised that. I should put that down in my memory banks! what new information! as if I couldn't see the, you know, magic robes, or magic bolts, or magic aura, or magic MAGIC that is surrounding you  
SkyTheKidRS: ...  
SkyTheKidRS: look I think the situation will diffuse in a matter of minutes

A bright blue light formed where TrueMU was hovering.

SkyTheKidRS: DO NOT BLAST HIM

The light faded.

"Well?"

Sky didn't want to tell him about the incident. He didn't want to be on Dave's bad side. Getting on any powerful mage's bad side meant that it wasn't a matter of if they would chase after you and make you a smear of pulverised flesh and organs across their study wall, but _when_. He bit back his urge to be completely honest and come clean, digging his nails into his palm and refusing to meet the leader of ChaosVille's eyes. His sword floated just out of reach. "We're going to see a friend."

"So you jumped out the window and started freerunning?!"

The feeling of his sides being pushed made him gag for a moment before the magic loosened up, Dave yelling out a very quiet "sorry". There was a little audience on ground level now. Sky briefly thought of just shrugging and saying that it was normal here, and make a few quips on the fact that the leader didn't research into their customs, but the residual feeling of helplessness of his body hanging in the air, at whatever mercy the mage could conjure up, dashed away that thought as soon as it entered his mind.

"I'm not telling a lie, that's for sure."

Dave snorted and rolled his eyes, quite obviously so Sky would see. His armour buzzed with his kinetic barriers as they tried to free their owner from the grip, but to no avail - the lights on it dimmed. "Alright then, simpler question. Why'd you and Xephos have this - I don't know, angry staring contest after Kirin asked where Lalna was?"

"You didn't hear us?" Sky had no time to pick and choose his words, the sentence tumbling out in his confused state before he could fully process what he just said. His eyes widened and his eyebrows raised in shock.

"I mean, you just looked at him and laughed for a few ticks before figuring out the expression on his face, and then you guys just stared at each other before everybody else got bored-wait, you're an untrained mage? XEPHOS is an untrained mage? You guys are telepaths?"

The neural transplant. The hidden speakers inside his ear for long-ranged talking - how did Xephos hack through his safeguards and start talking to him right in his mind? Without him even noticing any difference, at all?

He mentally scolded itself after the thought crossed his head - YogLabs technology, stupid. It must have been a cakewalk to go in and start talking directly to him -

Xephos could be listening in on him at any moment. He could hack his senses. It's not like he already had tons of leverage against the king, ha ha, why not just make it worse?

A chill went through his spine. Dave huffed, body becoming tense, facial expression unreadable. A far cry from the happy, innocent little mage that was last seen hopping up and down nervously before the meeting. "Are you going to actually tell me something one day, or is it customary here to just stare blankly at people and hope that they can read your mind?"

The tips on Sky's mouth curled downwards, sweat already starting to bead at his forehead and form at his palms. He had a sudden urge to scratch himself, a feeling of dysphoria like he wasn't there, that he needed to rip out of this skin to crush the tiny little mage under his limbs, that he needed to escape. The city wasn't right. Nothing here was right. Everything was too bright. His breath quickened slightly as a headache started to pound against his head. Smaller aches forming across his back.

He needed to get this over with.

"A mage. We're going to see our friend, the mage, to check up on him."

Dave's expression reverted back to the smile, frighteningly quick, the jagged edges of his enchanted robes smoothing out to reflect his mood swap. "Oh, a mage? Pff, why didn't you say so? Had me worried for a few ticks there."

Sky tried to smile at him, instead having that dreaded feeling that he was just showing rows of his teeth instead of anything that looked remotely like a smile.

[WARNING: user [DaveChaos] is accessing mapmarker_groupURGENT. Recommend eliminating threat.]

His sunglasses flashed the text across. His mind formed a message to send to TrueMU quicker than he could blink and off it went, unfiltered -

SkyTheKidRS: what?

"Don't worry about that, just trying to find the co-ords so we can both go there together, huh? Haven't seen a new mage in ages. Absolute ages."

The last bit was spoken with a monotone, Dave's voice going dangerously low. Other than that, his tone suggested that this was completely normal. Like asking someone to go on a picnic near the beach instead of, you know, force-teleporting someone to a place of extreme peril and dark magic?

[WARNING: login code USER: YogLabsAdmin PASSWORD: **************** granted. overriding precautions. Welcome, employee. The coffee machine is still broken. Subjects 60-135 recommended to go to decontamination unit at once. Remember, we are your friends.]

SkyTheKidRS: yogl AB/s he's with yogla bS?  
TrueMU: Sky?

[Location of SetoSorcerer - mage uploaded. Request teleport?]

How did _Dave_ work for YogLabs? ChaosVille was _just_ discovered, for Notch's sake!

SkyTheKidRS: Fly over to Seto, Dave's teleporting me there.

Shit, he didn't write that. Or think that.

"Dave, what the fuck are you-"

"Trust me, your friend's in danger anyway and you guys need to get to him fast. You should be rooting for me!"

"How in the Nether do you know that?!"

SkyTheKidRS: GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT GET OUT GETOUTGET OUT GTEOU TGET OUTOUTOU TOUT

[Teleport for 2 people requested]

Dave's body posture momentarily stiffened. For a brief tick, he saw something flash across his eyes - worry? Pure hate? The glowing neon rings that made up a demon's iris? Most likely worry. Sky felt the magic holding him let up, even for a moment, and started wriggling out to try and escape the teleport field, but the sensation of his body lurching forwards and his organs flip-flopping inside of him, the scenery around him melding and shifting like a glitching display from his city to a jungle, quickly erased any hope.

[We hope you have a nice day!]

* * *

To put it simply, everything hurt. Every inch of his body ached, the dull sensation of senses covered up by the constant throbbing pain. His arm lifted up a little, twitched in a way that was certainly not an indication of good health, and waved it in front of him, as if he could wave everything away as a dream that would just disappear with a slightest touch.

His body was shifted slightly to the left. Grass blades brushed over his back, his arms, his legs, like lying on a carpet. A prickly carpet with a few worms and assorted bugs crawling across it. His back lifted up out of the ground, as if in a trance, and he wondered how that could possibly work, why his limbs were so

odd

all of a sudden.

Like his body wasn't his own.

These episodes were rare, but Sky felt them nonetheless. Maybe a side-effect of cloning. He also hid them. Usually they came every few months, but lately...

The necklace vibrated once, somebody sending him a message, snapping Sky out of whatever that was. It felt different that time, a slight pressure added onto the limbs that were being moved around. Whatever it was, it dissipated before finally becoming a confused memory stored in Sky's head. Sweat stuck to him like slime, the humid air of the thick jungle almost choking him. One of his legs was on top of a bush with bright, yellow-and-red flowers blooming. His sword was to the right of him, lying there. It would have been beautiful under normal circumstances. Right now wasn't the time for sightseeing, or, regrettably, taking a nice bath, it was the time to find Seto and get out.

Where was Dave?

_The scheming son of a wolf. He better have some good excuses for somehow knowing a top-secret YogLabs login that don't include him actually working for that omnicidal excuse for a company._

The message that woke him up can wait for now.

He bunched one of his hands into a fist and wiped some dirt off his face, the feeling of being soaked in cold, calming water suddenly seemingly like an unreachable luxury. Maybe a few jungle ponds would have to do, but it'd be like bathing in your own sweat - gross, hot, and probably full of bacteria. Added with poisonous frogs or venomous snakes.

Something warm and liquid hit his forehead. Rain? A minor annoyance, but not that bad. It washed away the dirt and grime that he and his armour collected, that was for sure. It was hot, but not terribly so, and he considered just standing there and waiting for the rain to wash across him for an impromptu shower.

Again, he brought up his hand to give it a quick swipe off, bracing himself for the torrent of rain that was quick to come.. Something seemed off somehow. He licked his lips, dry from his sweating, and recoiled slightly when the metallic taste of blood went against his taste buds, spitting and gagging it out of his mouth and watching the mixture of saliva and blood roll down a nearby leaf to the ground. Some kind of insect happened to wander along before getting caught in the trail.

It wasn't his own blood. He would have seen it immediately.

It was the droplet of "rain" that appeared earlier.

He was scared to look up.

He looked up anyway.

On the branches, the limp form of DaveChaos hung there, cuts slicing across his skin like a morbid decoration. The shift in leaves told him that he might he still breathing, or the wind was acting up today, but -

Maybe Dave had it all explained. Maybe Dave was honestly trying to help him. He DID save a lot of time by teleporting near Seto's house. Maybe Dave, the mage he is, could have stopped the Abyss portal. Maybe the reason he knew Seto was in trouble was because he could feel the magic in the air being strained and pushed, twisted into a screaming monstrosity of hate and flesh (and sometimes not even flesh).

Maybe Sky just killed an innocent today.

A heave. A sputter. To his relief, the mage groaned and rolled out of the trees, yelling when he hit the jungle floor. Small droplets of blood went flying along with moisture collected on the leaves. "Feck...why'd you have to go ahead and ruin the teleport?"

"Because I had no idea what you were doing?"

"Hmmph." Dave stared at him for a bit with a pouting expression over his face, before deciding to agree with him. "We're a bit off. You think your blobby alien buddy'll come here in ti-oh my god, are you okay?"

Dave rushed forwards hand placed a hand on either side of Sky's face, his sunglasses bouncing up and down on his head from his shaking. "Look at that bruise! And those rough spots! Musta taken off a layer of skin or something, wow, whoops. Sorry."

The person that was currently bleeding and had lacerations all over his body was worried about the person who just had a bruise. "I've had worse. Parkour after all, but, uh, you're bleeding."

Dave looked surprised. "Oh! The bleeding! Yeah," he raised up his left hand before a green aura went between the both of them, his cuts closing up on their own and Sky's bruise slowly going away. It was a bit unnerving to see a final spout of blood come out of every cut all at once before the liquid evaporated, out of all things, and all of the tiny cuts all over him slowly mend up and merge together to form seamless skin. "Forgot about that for a tick there."

A scream interrupted their quality bonding time, ear-piercing and close. He closed his eyes and sent out a quick ping.

SkyTheKidRS: truemu, I'm currently near seto's base. dave is fine.  
SkyTheKidRS: seto, if you can still receive this, please be okay

"Sky?" Dave voice, cheery despite the odds, piped up, "Looks like some Abyss portal fragments are coming this way. Never seen one this close, wish I brought my notebook or something..."

Sky snapped his head around, his ponytail whacking Dave right in the face. Right where Dave's eyes were looking, there were a few cracks. Completely pitch black, except for white splotches. Like a spiderweb, forming their way towards them to ensnare them.

"Huh, nobody's ever seen that kind of aggressive behaviour in the wee beasties before...this might be a first! Damn, I knew I should have brought something to write in!"

His eyes couldn't pry themselves away from the Abyss that was encroaching on their territory. Dave's ramblings fell on empty ears as Sky's body tried to run away, call out somebody's name, _anything_ , and thoughts were but a distant thrum against his head. Something brief flickered in the back of his mind. _How could anybody, much less a human, stand up to this?_

"Nobody's going to believe me...unless you also testify with me! Two eyewitnesses would stand a better chance." Dave paused, putting a hand on his chin and looked around thoughtfully, "Hm. The eyes are new. Wonder what happened in that realm to unbalance it like that?"

The white splotches were eyes. Any eyes. Human, animal, whatever. They watched the two squirm uncomfortably.

A quick survey showed that they were completely surrounded - Seto wasn't anywhere, which was worrying. A hopeful spark in Sky told him, tried to _fool_ him into believing that Seto had the possibility of being alive, that the portal simply led to somewhere else into the overworld instead of the emptiness demon realm of Limbo. Normally he would have immediately tried syncing to another clone in stasis, transferring his consciousness to the new one while his old body broke up into little cubes that would splatter all over the jungle, but right now that would mean that Dave would be left alone out here, and TrueMU would have blundered right into this mess. Teleporting again would also destabilise the both of them, and he didn't feel like living out the rest of this clone's short life as a cancerous mass fused with Dave.

The ground beneath them cracked as it turned into more portal blocks, grass opening up to show nothing. The eyes seemed gleeful, full of malice and an almost child-like view on murder. Dave didn't seem that concerned, but a twitch in his eyes betrayed his inner emotions. Both of them were equally terrified.

"Ah. Well, Sky, it's sure been a pleasure to work with you, no matter how brief. Sorry for the miscommunication earlier, and, uh," he gulped as one tendril of his robes stretched oddly and spiralled into the growing portal like light in a black hole, "Just. Maybe we'll make it out."

SkyTheKidRS: truemu, start tracking me. I think I'm going to be transported somewhere else soon  
TrueMU: dave again?  
SkyTheKidRS: abyss portal's got us surrounded. I'm afraid

(-that I won't be coming back)

The last part didn't send.

TrueMU arrived to see nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case I didn't explain it all that well, the chat system that Team Crafted (and friends) and the Yogscast use are implants (the UI is normally all implants but Sky has them on his sunglasses) that can automatically "type" what they want to say in and send it so there's no hassle of actually typing, with the downside that if you aren't careful it'll send a message anyway, while the ones that AH and The Creatures (and friends) use are physical objects like a headset that can project the UI in front of the user.
> 
> The AH one is the oldest model out of them all and has really clunky controls but has automatic crafting (think exactly like the XBOX Minecraft UI), while Yogscast has the newest model (normal inventory with all the Too Many Items UIs). Team Crafted is the normal non-modded Minecraft UI, and The Creatures is non-modded Minecraft UI. The Creatures had the newest model at the time of the territory suddenly becoming an island.
> 
> YogLabs makes these.


End file.
